No Immunity

water out here?”
    “Lady, I don’t put up with—”
    “What’re you going to do? Arrest me? Take me back to Vegas and kidnap me again?”
    “Lady!”—His face was all red now. He was yelling—“I am damned well going to make you tell me the truth about this.”
    “Fine.” She leaned back on her chair, propped her feet against his desk, and said, “You’ve decided what the truth is. Tell me about it.”
    His arm came down hard, stopping an inch from her shins. She forced herself to maintain the rhythm of her breath, to give no indication that his muscular control was more frightening than the hit would have been. “Am I under arrest? Or is police brutality a gift to every citizen? Her voice was too loud for her languid pose, but she needed the volume to cover the quiver that was threatening to expose her. Fox was twice her size, but she wasn’t about to lose.
    “You brought the body here because you figured you o dump it out in the country where we wouldn’t be smart enough to know it was contagious.”
    “Did I bring it from California? Flying in coach? I flew Southwest; maybe I got a ‘friends fly free’ fare.”
    The cords in his neck sprang out, but he didn’t speak-He fingered a small picture on his desk, staring at it as if for control. “You’re a private eye. You got hired out of Vegas.”
    So he’d already done a background search on her, a background search that he’d had to get the sheriff in the county seat to do on his computer, then dispatched five deputies to pick her up. This guy had a lot riding on her guilt. A sensible woman would choose each word with caution. “So I’m disposing of someone else’s dead body, huh? Why would one of your fine citizens hire an out-of-state detective to get rid of a corpse? Surely in Las Vegas you’ve got enough thugs who are expert at that?”
    “You’ve got no local connections. Word’s not going to be all over town before the body’s cold.”
    “But why would I bring it here? This state is ninety percent desert. I could have driven ten miles out of Las Vegas, dumped the body, and made my flight back to San Diego with an hour to spare for the slots. Why would I go to all the trouble of bringing her up here and foisting her on a guy I haven’t seen in years?” She dropped her feet to the floor with a thud. “Just tell me that.”
    Fox’s pudgy face broadened into a smile. It was clear from the strained lines across his jaw that this wasn’t an expression he employed often. “You brought the body here, Doctor, so that you’d have a reason to see Jeff Tremaine again.”
    “So you’re changing your story? I didn’t just drop the body and run, then?”
    His hard-held smile dropped, and for the first time he seemed flustered. The picture frame slid from his fingers, landing facedown on the desk.
    “You know, Sheriff, if I’d wanted to see Jeff, I could have met him and his wife in Vegas for dinner. It would have been easier.”
    “Ah, but that’s just what you couldn’t do. Mrs. Tremaine is a fine woman, much too fine a woman to eat with you. She knows what happened in Africa.”
    Kiernan stared, the game gone flat. The air felt thicker filled with the stale odor of dust like the dry earth that swept around every door and through the windows in Africa. How could Jeff Tremaine’s wife know about Hope Mkema? Jeff had said just today that he hadn’t mentioned Hope’s name since he left India. There were no other Americans on the project. Surely Mrs. Tremaine in Gattozzi, Nevada, hadn’t been in contact with the British or African doctors from the Lassa fever project. And yet, if Jeff didn’t tell her... She herself certainly hadn’t. And Hope Mkema was dead.
    “Gotcha there, Doctor. Crime always catches up with you. You should have just left Jeff Tremaine alone.”
    Her eyes shot open. “What! Are you crazy? You think that ”
    “There’s no point in lying now.”
    “I’m telling you—”
    He started to reach for her arm, then seemed to think better of it. “You come in here, dump a body, lie to the sheriff, and now you figure I’m going to believe your word over that of one of the most respected citizens in town?
    “Sheriff,” she said through tightly clenched jaw, “there’s a lot of accusation without the presence of the accuser going on here. Get Jeff Tremaine and his wife over here and let them speak for themselves.”
    “Out of town.”
    “What?”
    “They’re out of town.”
    “Jeff was just